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Dear Friends,

How do you
measure success?

There are
the things you can count. The number of
people we’ve helped start businesses, save for the first time in their lives,
and increase their families’ standard of living. New funders added. New projects initiated.
Awards won.

And there
are the things you can’t count. You just
have to listen.

“I am not an educated lady,” explained Surekha Toppo to us
last October, as we sat beneath a shady tree in Jharsugauda, her rural village
in India. “But my children will go to school and they will ride a bike. This is dignity to me.” Other women in a nearby village spoke
enthusiastically about how their Trickle Up savings groups successfully secured
a community day care center, road improvements, and greater access to a local
hospital: ﻿“Now we have a voice and we
use it!” ﻿
Testimonials like these are our most vivid indicators
of success. Here are some other ways Trickle
Up achieved success in 2014:

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We helped 8,185 people in five regions– an increase of more than 25% from 2013 -- start or expand businesses, learn new skills, build savings and assets, and forge powerful social bonds with one another. With about five people benefitting from each Trickle Up business,we reached more than 45,000 people.

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Survey
research from more than 1,400 Trickle Up participants in India, Burkina Faso,
and Guatemala added to the growing body of evidence of our effectiveness. Research demonstrates that Trickle Up helps
improve families’ food supply and quality, ability to acquire productive
assets, and develop consistent savings habits.
We are especially proud of data showing how ﻿Trickle Up gives women a
stronger voice in their households and communities. ﻿ For details, please see the Trickle Up 2014 Outcomes
Report, a summary of our research results.

Our partnership with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
served 3,147 people in Costa Rica, Ecuador, and in Alexandria and Cairo,
Egypt. In
2015, we expect to help nearly 5,000 people through our UNHCR partnership. We are exploring other global partnerships
for similar “technical assistance” projects, with Trickle Up helping design and
manage programs based on our experience reaching the poorest and most vulnerable people.

We continued
two innovative projects to explore new ways to
support highly vulnerable populations: at-risk children in Burkina Faso and women
in India who face domestic violence. In
partnership with the Women’s Refugee Commission and the University of Chicago, the
Burkina project is studying the effects of Trickle Up’s economic strengthening
program on children’s welfare and the impact of adding an education component
to combat hazardous child labor and forced marriages. In India, with support from the Ford
Foundation, women from 115 Trickle Up savings groups in West Bengal documented
and shared one another’s experiences with gender-based violence through a
participatory video project that aims to help women confront domestic abuse.
In India, we expanded our reach beyond our traditional
“ultrapoor” target by providing support to “very poor” women --those living in poverty but
not at as deep a level as our traditional target group and always at risk of
sliding further into the very deepest levels of poverty and vulnerability. This approach – currently adding 1,800 “very
poor” women to 600 “ultrapoor” – gives Trickle Up a greater presence in rural
villages, reaching 10-15% of the families in a community. Both groups receive similar business and
savings training, with the ultrapoor also receiving Trickle Up seed capital
grants.

Continuing our commitment to families affected by disability, who are highly likely to live in conditions of deep poverty, we published Disability, Poverty and Livelihoods. We are sharing this guide with other poverty agencies and governments to help them incorporate people with disabilities into livelihood programs. ﻿﻿In June, Trickle Up was selected to be the recipient of the InterAction 2014 Disability Inclusion Award,﻿﻿ recognizing our longstanding commitment to people with disabilities. Trickle Up also received the Disability Inclusion Award in 2009, making us the only InterAction member to win it twice.

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﻿The MetLife Foundation selected Trickle Up as one of its first grantees﻿﻿ for its new $200 million, five-year commitment to promote “financial inclusion” -- helping low-income individuals and families gain access to safe and affordable financial products and services.

What
does it
take to accomplish all of this? We’re
proud to say that we did all this with a staff of 35 people – half in our New
York headquarters and half divided among our field offices in Burkina Faso,
Guatemala, and India. We think of
Trickle Up as perhaps the world’s largest venture capitalist, helping foster
8,185 businesses last year and providing capital, training and encouragement
that is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for so many people.

As
we enter 2015, Trickle Up is poised to make dramatic progress. Through expanded technical assistance work,
new funding partnerships, and continued innovation based on the Trickle Up
model that has endured since 1979, we look forward to helping foster more than
10,000 businesses this year. We continue
to strive to strengthen our impact in every household we reach, with carefully
measured results that demonstrate why Trickle Up is a sound investment in the
potential of the world’s poorest and most excluded people.